Front track alignment?

[piper]

Chrome ckranks has been at my shop now, the problem on his sled was found at the front track torque arm lower mounting, the clearence between bushing and arm is little to high, and when the sled only have 1 Limiter strap the suspension will move to left.

You can push the rail side ways if the clerance is to high, the easy solution will be to mount 2 limiter straps.

 

[LoudHandle]

So how much narrower is the arm than the cross shaft? It would be lighter to cut the cross shaft shorter and install washers between the rails and the cross shaft to make up the difference. Or bushings on both sides of arm, but more of a pain to install. Finally shorten cross shaft to just longer than the arm tube and pull the rails in that slight amount, if indeed it is only a slight amount (1/16"-1/8").

More issues with manufacturing tolerances? Good help is getting harder to find these days. At the very least this should have been blatantly obvious to whoever was loading the jig prior to welding.

 

[chrome ckranks]

OK. clearance is not in the longitudinal direction of the cross shaft. Pipe diameter of the torque arm is too large compared to the cross shaft diameter. So with only one limiter strap suspension will pull to one side until the slack is assessed

 

[LoudHandle]

In that case, if it were my sled I would reduce the OD of the cross shaft in a lathe for 1 1/2-2" on each side and make a couple bushings out of Delrin so there is little to no slop and even with one strap the skid can not rack and cause the misalignment.

I typically do this mod to all my rear suspensions (stock and aftermarket) to save a couple pounds of grease for one and to make it frictionless and free moving. I take it apart once a year and lube just the Delrin bushing to shaft and tube interfaces.

A shame they didn't size the tubing right. Likely decreased the wall thickness to save weight and were too cheap to make the new cross shafts the correct size for just a film of grease.

Short of access to a lathe, two limiters are the next best choice.